


I Could Hold You For a Million Years

by theshipsfirstmate



Series: Make You Feel My Love [1]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: F/M, post-4x06, the smoak ladies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-16
Updated: 2015-11-16
Packaged: 2018-05-01 22:55:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5224115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theshipsfirstmate/pseuds/theshipsfirstmate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All those post-4x06 Olicity feels. About finding themselves in each other with the help of one Donna Smoak, who might still be a little lost herself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Could Hold You For a Million Years

_A/N: My feelings were so jacked up after that ep, writing this fic felt like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. I hope it actually makes some kind of picture._

_Title from “Make You Feel My Love.” Dylan, Adele, Garth, Billy, Kelly, take your pick._

**I Could Hold You For a Million Years**

When Felicity was 12, her mother got her heart broken for the second time. At least, she’s pretty sure it was the second time, Donna wore her heart right out in the open, though she rarely bothered with sleeves. He was a pastry chef at the Venetian and the two of them worked the same graveyard shift for about a year. Felicity thinks it probably says something about what time does to wounds that she can’t recall the guy’s name  – David, or Daniel, something biblical and unabbreviated – but she can remember the way her mother smiled when he would shake flour from his hair over their kitchen sink.

He was the first man Donna brought to the apartment after her father left, the first one allowed inside their little space, the first one Felicity had learned to fight an attachment to. She hadn’t been young enough to fall for the guy blindly, and not quite old enough for total teenage attitude, so she had struggled in the middle ground as the man wooed her mother. 

Despite Felicity’s best efforts to maintain a calculated distance, however, he had gradually won her over with dumb computer jokes and a shared love of the Twilight Zone, even once talking her into an ill-fated baking experiment when he caught her on a chemistry kick one weekend and explained how much math was involved in making cookies.

She’s smart enough to know that the first moment she learned to not trust her feelings was when she realized that the baker’s smile didn’t fill his eyes entirely like her mother’s did. He was kind and he was fun, but he wasn’t in nearly as deep as Donna was, and when he stopped coming around, Felicity tried to force down the feeling that somehow they weren’t enough as her mother sobbed against her on the couch.

But it breaks her heart a little now to understand that she and Oliver have the opposite problem, that the thing that threatens them is the magnitude of his feelings for her, and how it sweeps her beneath the surface like an undercurrent. It’s nearly gotten a man killed, and yet every attempt to push him away leaves her feeling worse. When she snaps at him for dragging her away from the lab, he talks her all the way down until she has to reach out for his hand. When she walks away from him in the lair, she has to turn away so his mournful eyes don’t rip her guts out. When he offers to make dinner, like some character in a supermarket romance novel, she resists him, loudly but futilely, because she’s filled with furious guilt and the feeling has nowhere to go but explode on whatever’s closest. Which is him, of course it is.

* * *

She’s never known exactly what happened to make her mother came home extra smiley from a one-on-one meeting with her high school guidance counselor when she was 14, and she’s never, ever wanted to. It was the middle of her sophomore year and the “what to do with Felicity” question was quickly becoming a frustrating reality as she had collected enough credits to be graduation-eligible by the following fall and was rapidly running out of public school curriculum to work her way through.

At her next meeting with the guy, who wasn’t even that cute, by the way – he was a jock type with thinning hair who probably majored in counseling because the building was close to the gym – he simply told her that her early graduation was on track and tried to push Caltech on her one more time. His older sister was an alum, he angled again with a smile that had too many teeth, and “besides, wouldn’t it be nice to be close to that mother of yours?”

For any number of reasons, that was the moment she decided on M.I.T.

She loved college, had sailed through with near perfect marks,while keeping her tragic hacker origin story almost entirely under wraps. “Great work this semester, Smoak,” her senior advisor sent back with her final project for her business tech seminar. “You’ll make a hell of a CEO someday.”

She’s smart enough to know that she’s wanted a job like this since then, even if she had laughed at the assumption at the time. The IT department, the assistant’s desk, were so obviously beneath her, despite her age. For a long time, it hadn’t mattered, the mission gave her the added purpose her professional life lacked. But after one week in the Palmer Tech CEO seat – overseeing the technology she loves coupled with the power and capital to effect real change and make real advancements – she had realized just how deeply she had packed away her dreams in order to chase down Oliver’s nightmares.

But it breaks her heart a little when his expression goes nearly despondent during their dinner disaster, when his voice drops as he admits to her mother that he doesn’t know what he’s done wrong, when she realizes too late how of course he would hear “I lost myself in you” as an accusation. It’s her fault, she reminds them both.  She had dreamed of this job, and still, the sight of him slumbering peacefully on the pillow next to her in Bali had almost made her turn it down flat out. It was her choice. But it’s not comforting when they both know she’s questioning whether or not she made the right one.

* * *

Felicity came home reluctantly the summer after Cooper went away, because the streets of Boston were too crowded with memories and she couldn’t afford to be anywhere else. Donna had been delighted to see her newly-blonde hair, distressed by her new skirt length, and thankfully not too interested in anything else. She had been distracted by a new fling, and Felicity was grateful for the diversion, until curiosity got the best of her.

“He’s separated,” her mother had protested when she confronted her, like the word meant something different.

“That’s just a fancy word that cheaters use to avoid saying ‘still married,’” she had snapped back, arms crossed, her guilty conscience twisting a little in perverse pleasure at the chance for the moral high ground. Because not only was he married, he was her _boss_. Even for Donna, it was an advanced level of bad decision making.

“Hon, can’t you just be happy for me?” her mother had pleaded, with tired, sad eyes that nearly broke her. “I’m happy, it’s just…it’s complicated.”

“It’s really not.” Felicity remembers storming out dramatically, hacking her way into a few nights at the Venetian without telling Donna where she was going. If she spent hours seated at a table in the dining room that faced the dessert station, well, it’s just because that’s where the free wi-fi was the strongest. She hadn’t lost herself in Cooper, she remembers telling herself as she revamped her online identity for a new life in Starling City, she had lost herself in the mission. Everything else was just guilt. She wasn’t anything like her mother, and in no time at all, she was impatient to prove it.

She’s smart enough to know that it’s not true, but it feels like she’s been waiting on something her whole life. It’s not just frustrated exhaustion that makes her snap at Oliver and Diggle when they’re game-planning how to get Ray back, she really does hate it that much. Waiting for her father to come back, waiting to get out of Las Vegas, waiting to make something of her life, waiting for Oliver. (That she’s waiting now to fix something that’s her fault in the first place is just an extra layer of suck.)

But it breaks her heart a little to realize that the problem with waiting all the time is not knowing what to do when the waiting is over. Oliver had been so difficult to love for the first few years, it’s like she hadn’t been ready for it to ever be easy. She’s a little overwhelmed by his constant presence, and it’s not something she fully understands until his eyes go wide with worry. “This is about us.”

Emotion socks her in the gut so hard that she gives into her first instinct to lie to him before almost immediately realizing that it’s useless. She lets a tear fall when he tells her he’s leaving, but she doesn’t let herself stop him, and the look he gives her is close enough to betrayal that it steals the breath from her lungs.

* * *

She’s shoulder-deep in memories when her mother comes into her room, _their_ room, with a mug and a lame excuse, and it’s hard not be overwhelmed by futile exhaustion at the space camp story. Felicity realizes quickly that that’s not what they’re actually talking about, even if Donna doesn’t know the half of it.

She’s smart enough to know she’s not her mother. She’s probably known that since she first handed her mother the pamphlet and watch Donna balk. “You’re ten years old, you can’t go into space!” And she knows Oliver isn’t anything like her father. He’s not like anyone she’s ever known, and that includes the Oliver Queen she met four years ago. This man, the one that’s fighting her every attempt to push him away, the one supporting her entirely while never once questioning the loyalties of her heart, he’s brave and loyal and all the things you say about someone who keeps coming back.

But it breaks her heart a little to hear her mother so stricken when she voices her fear of getting lost in Oliver. He had taken it as a blow, but Donna takes as some cosmic misunderstanding of true love itself. Felicity knows her mother’s never been with a worthy man, though if it saddens her to watch her admit it, and she’s sure that even if Donna knew all of his secrets, she’d still find Oliver more than deserving of her daughter’s heart. That’s something they agree on, actually.

“Don’t get in your own way,” her mother warns, and she takes the message seriously. “Don’t ruin something most people never get.”

* * *

She’s less snippy than merely impatient when she asks her mother to give them a moment alone in the loft after she gets back from dropping Ray off at a hotel room under a hastily-generated alias, but it’s only because she has so many things to say to Oliver. The adrenaline of the day has finally worn off, and now her relief at Ray’s safety is melding with exhaustion and a more objective view of how wonderful he’s been throughout the whole thing. The rush of emotion has her desperate to make sure he’s okay, that she hasn’t pushed him too far.

That said, she probably still deserves the attitude she gets from Donna, who mutters something about a mani-pedi on her way out the door, but thankfully says nothing further about makeup sex.

She needs to thank him, she thinks, as she leaves her shoes in the living area and bounds up the stairs barefoot, hoping to catch him unaware. He’s been balancing her out all day, keeping her afloat as the guilt tried to pull her under. It’s a feeling he’s got some experience with, she reflects regretfully. She needs to thank him and kiss him and tell him all the things bounding around in her brain…right after she gets a good long look at him, laying on his side of the bed in those sweatpants.

She’s not lost in him at all, she realizes in that moment. She’s mapped that amazing body with her hands, and she knows that right now, he’s writing a letter he’ll never send to his childhood best friend, because on their trip, he had crinkled his nose adorably at the idea of journaling, until she asked him what he would tell Tommy about his life now. He had come back to her twenty minutes later with four pages that made her sob against his chest as he read them aloud, and the next day, she bought him a little green notebook with an arrow pattern at a marketplace in Venice.

She’s smart enough to know that finding herself in him doesn’t have to mean losing it anywhere else. It’s what her mother had meant, what she hopes she’s known all along despite being blinded by panic.

But it breaks her heart a little when she pauses after “we should…” without consider how he might fill in the blanks. His whole face falls for a split second, and she vows to never give him another moment’s hesitation like that.

She talks fast then, eager to right his troubled thoughts, and the flame in his eyes reignites, bringing his easy smile back with it, when she repeats what her mother told her. Then, his lips are on hers and the tension of the week drains out of her as she drapes herself over his solid frame, feeling his heart beat up against hers as he wraps her in his arms.

She’s not lost. She’s home.


End file.
